The German group study targeted objective spirit rather than individual subjective opinion

Evidence

Our study is more concerned with intellectual supply than with intellectual demand. However, it is not interested in the institutional form of this, in mass communications', but rather in the more vague but omnipresent form in which it touches people in their social existence: in the intellectual atmosphere which they breathe . . . The central interest of the study is therefore not directed towards subjective opinions at all, but rather to those elements of consciousness which are objectively predetermined and prescribed and disseminated socially; it is directed, precisely, towards the objective spirit’, the `German ideology’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1881

Categorization

• DEFINE: Adorno’s use of ‘objective spirit’ here defines the study’s actual object: socially prescribed consciousness rather than individual opinions.
• XREF: connects to: The study targeted socially prescribed consciousness, not individual opinions; The group-study method remained theoretically confused in practice — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1884; The Frankfurt group pioneered Germany’s group discussion technique for social research — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1872 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno’s group study sacrificed attribution specificity for objective-spirit analysis. #corroborates (0.90) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2035
• German industrial management commissioned social research to uncover workers’ underlying opinion formation #contradicts (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2059
• German idealism legitimated knowledge by unifying truth and justice in a single subject #qualifies (0.75) — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 268
• Empirical research can expose ideology by confronting subjective motives with objective economic facts #contradicts (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1931